confused about when to use an AI agent vs a regular workflow

fair question. heres how i think about it: use a workflow when: you know exactly what needs to happen in what order. like form submission > create record > send email. its deterministic, same input always produces same output use an agent when: the task requires understanding, judgment, or dealing with unstructured data. like "read this customer email and figure out what they want, then do the right thing." the agent decides the path, not you email categorization is actually a good example. if you have 5 fixed categories a workflow with keyword matching works fine. but if you need to understand nuance like "is this a complaint or a feature request when the customer says they love the product but wish it did X" then an agent handles that better

ok that actually makes sense. so workflows are for "do exactly this" and agents are for "figure out what to do". got it

another way to think about it: use an agent when the number of possible input variations is too high to define rules for. a customer support inbox has thousands of possible questions. you cant build a condition node for each one. thats where agents shine

i was confused about this at first too. now i use agents for anything customer-facing (support, chat, intake) and workflows for everything internal (data sync, notifications, approvals). works well as a mental model

also worth noting you can combine them. we have a workflow that triggers an agent as one of its steps. workflow handles the structured parts, agent handles the parts that need judgment